Sarah Bufkin Cultural Studies--Honors Thesis 7 Nov At the Frontiers of Writing: Exploring the Productive Encounter Between the Poetic and the Political in Northern Ireland during the Troubles Sarah Bufkin Cultural Studies Honors Thesis Fall 2013 1 Sarah Bufkin Cultural Studies--Honors Thesis 7 Nov Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…..3 Chapter 1 The Belfast Group as a Collective Assemblage of Enunciation………………………………………………….11 Chapter 2 John Hewitt Stakes Out the Protestant Territorial Claim…………………………………………………………..26 Chapter 3 Louis MacNeice Revels in Contradiction and Displacement………………………………………………………47 Chapter 4 A Quest for Civil Rights Devolves into a Violent Sectarianism……………………………………………………89 Chapter 5 Understanding the Political Possibilities Internal to the Poem’s Act of Enunciation………………..133 Chapter 6 Seamus Heaney Names His (Catholic) Nation…………………………………………………………………………175 Chapter 7 Derek Mahon Attempts to Escape His Unionist Roots…………………………………………………………….218 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….246 2 Sarah Bufkin Cultural Studies--Honors Thesis 7 Nov Introduction You were silly like us; your gift survived it all: The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.1 So W.H. Auden wrote in his elegy for W.B. Yeats. His view that poetry does not do political work is one shared by many people, poets included. While some lines of verse may be held aloft as a rallying cry and others might memorialize those who have fallen, few sonnets directly exert a revolutionary fervor. And yet poets continue to write verse after verse and continue to publish their work, to send it before an audience. “The minute one starts believing that [poetry] hasn't [any agency], there's no point in doing it,” rejoins Northern Irish poet Paul Muldoon. “It has to have efficacy at some level.” But how the poetic intervenes in a political situation—how its statements and descriptions, its images and aural resonances, can exert itself on bodies and corporeal arrangements—remains unclear. I want to take up this problematic—locating within the poetic the potential for a radical politics. This paper does not attempt any universalizing or totalizing answers to Auden’s proposition; I do not want to assume that any particular literary genre possesses an essential and abstract agency divorced from its context.2 Instead, I want to look at how the poetry produced in and through a particular socio-historical moment might make an attempt. The encounter between the poetic and the political in Northern Ireland during the mid-20th Century complicates Auden’s ready avowal of their disjunction. Forty years after its geopolitical partition 1 W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," Another Time (New York: Random House, 1940) Lines 32-41. 2 “The only possible definition of language is the set of all order-words, implicit presuppositions, or speech-acts current in a language at a given moment.” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 79. 3 Sarah Bufkin Cultural Studies--Honors Thesis 7 Nov from the rest of Ireland, Ulster3 saw the emergence of a new generation of poets who took on a distinctly Northern Irish identity.4 Their work attempted to articulate the lived experiences of individuals caught in a bitterly-divided society. Headed by the triumvirate of Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and Michael Longley, these poets set about reworking the region’s literary landscape in their own image. Modern Irish identity had always closely aligned itself with the poetic. “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” Yet the 1960s and 70s generations spoke not only to their fellow countrymen, but to a global audience. Starting in the late 1960s and continuing through the 1980s, sectarian and political violence erupted in Northern Ireland as the predominantly-Catholic Irish Republicans waged an anticolonial campaign against British security forces and loyalist Protestant militias.5 The newfound media attention directed the international gaze towards the Ulster literary scene. A note to poets Frank Ormsby and Michael Foley from Longley (in his capacity as the assistant director of the Arts Council) extolls the frustrated resignation the poets showed towards the journalistic narrative of artists working in violent times. Longley writes: BBC TV's Late Night Line-Up seem to be interested in mounting a programme about the Ulster artists' response to "The Situation."--Ugh! I hear you say: but no publicity is bad publicity, as the fella said. Would you phone me Monday (morning if possible) when we can have a cozy chat about how the tragedy has affected you "and your generation," as [poet] John Montague would say.6 More seriously, the violence also exacted its own demands upon the poets. For the Northern Irish poets, Auden’s question posed itself as more than an intellectual exercise. With the social fabric rending 3 Northern Ireland contains six of Ulster’s nine counties. Throughout history, the province’s boundaries have fluctuated. The U.K. press commonly uses the term interchangeably with ‘Northern Ireland.’ In the statelet itself, the term is also used, predominantly by Unionists; some Nationalists object to the territorial designation. Throughout this paper, I will refer use both “Ulster” and “Northern Ireland” to refer to the polity. 4 Gerald Dawe, "History Class: Northern Poetry, 1970-82," New Hibernia Review 7.1 (2003): 75-86. 5 T. G. Fraser, Ireland in Conflict: 1922-1998 (New York, NY: Routledge, 2000) 46-47. 6 Letter from Michael Longley to Frank Ormsby, Frank Ormsby papers, circa 1967-2004, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. 4 Sarah Bufkin Cultural Studies--Honors Thesis 7 Nov around them, they felt called upon to speak to and through troubled Ulster. As Longley would note in a 1979 interview, a writer “would be inhuman if he did not respond to tragic events in his own community and a poor artist if he did not seek to endorse that response imaginatively.” But take caution, he continued, for “the artist needs time in which to allow the raw material of experience to settle to an imaginative depth.”7 Each poet faced the pressurized choice: to write or not to write about the Troubles and its bloodshed. If they engaged directly, they could—and were—exposed to charges of exploiting the political situation for personal gain or of aestheticizing and implicitly condoning its violence. If they chose to skirt the miasma, they were accused of ignoring and evading the suffering in front of them in order to dabble in personal or bucolic scenes. “As my Province burns, I sing of love.”8 For the most part, the poets whose work has remained in circulation ignored the impetus to an immediate politicizing or grand-standing rhetoric. They opted instead to remain faithful to the imaginative frontier of their art. As Ulster poet Tom Paulin worried in his verse on 1970s Belfast: “The theatre is in the streets,/The streets are in the theatre,/The poet is torn to pieces.” 9 And so the newly-emergent Ulster literary community served as a space in which the aesthetic was both respected and pursued seriously—not as a mere act of individual catharsis, but as a public act of engagement with an uncertain and tumultuous world. In this particular conjuncture, the sectarian violence and the poetic outpouring of the Northern Irish writers do not appear to merely coexist; they are articulated together into a radical and productive encounter. Muldoon puts it simply in his poem, “7 Middagh Street:” For history’s a twisted root with art it’s small, translucent fruit and never the other way round. 7 Quoted in Frank Ormsby, introduction, A Rage for Order: Poetry of the Northern Ireland Troubles (Belfast, Northern Ireland: The Blackstaff Press, 1992) xvii. 8 John Montague, introductory verse, The Great Cloak (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1978) 9 Tom Paulin, “The Other Voice,” A Rage for Order, ed. Frank Ormsby (Belfast, Northern Ireland: The Blackstaff Press, 1992) Lines 94-96. 5 Sarah Bufkin Cultural Studies--Honors Thesis 7 Nov The roots by which we were once bound are severed here, in any case, and we are all now dispossessed; prince, poet, construction worker, salesman, soda-fountain jerker— all equally isolated. Each loads flour, sugar and salted beef into a covered wagon and strikes out for his Oregon.10 It is not just the poets that must deal with the displacement of the Troubles; all of those individuals living in Northern Ireland through the crisis must find ways to adapt and endure.11 We are all now dispossessed, all equally isolated, all striking out for our Oregons with the provisions we see fit. But because of the poet’s public position within Northern Irish society,12 because the province’s other discursive spaces seemed unable to speak but in tired clichés, the literary was called upon to make some sort of response. “Collective or national consciousness is ‘often inactive in external life and always in the process of break-down,’ [and so] literature finds itself positively charged with the role and function of the collective, and even revolutionary, enunciation.”13 But what response could poetry qua poetry make? “Personally I find myself wilting at the thought of instructing people or interpreting experience 10 Paul Muldoon, “7, Middagh Street,” excerpted in A Rage for Order, ed. Ormsby (1992) Lines 15-26. 11 “It is not just the [Northern Irish] writers and politicians who must make the effort I’m talking about: the whole population are adepts in the mystery of living in two places at one time.